


Cordyceps

by Taciturn



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Blood, F/M, Obsessive Behavior, Possessive Behavior, Smoking, Yandere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 02:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13424985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taciturn/pseuds/Taciturn
Summary: Moving to the city to pursue his dreams of becoming a renowned chef, Ignis discovers the wild and dangerous nature of falling in love with you.





	Cordyceps

Upon your first meeting with Ignis, he had thought you were rather odd. He noticed that you kept your eyes to the ground, counting your steps as you ran your fingertips along the wall. You were murmuring to yourself a jumble of numbers which meant the world and the universe to you while it made absolutely no sense to him or anyone else that could make out your quiet words. Strange as it all was, he could remember the exact numbers you counted as you walked past him, not even noticing he existed. Like another regular wall fixture, you took two steps and moved right by him, the barest traces of a touch brushed his shoulder as you muttered _'Seven, twelve, sixteen.... Five....'_

From that moment, he knew down to the very marrow of his bones that you had already infected him.

People moved in and out of the apartment complex often enough for Ignis to never mind who was coming and going. However, the ever so brief meeting he had with you altered the way he would look down that dimly lit hallway which lead to his apartment for the rest of his time knowing you.

Ignis lived in an ideal world. To him, it was in perfect order and control. He was pursuing his dreams, maintaining stable friendships and having a loving family whom supported his decisions and aspirations. Moving to the city was the first step to achieving those dreams. After months of meticulous planning, he had finally come to terms with his reality and organized his thoughts into a six step plan to his ideal future. Though it meant leaving what stability he had, he knew that he would never truly be happy unless he reached his goals. Since he was young, he had honed his skills as a pastry chef; and now, it was time. Now or never; while his fingers were nimble and his muscles still had strength in them, he had to try. He threw himself into the competitive world, confident that he would do well and thrive.

Of course, there was a difference between those dreams of glory and the harsh reality of his life. Application after application was filled. Phone calls of nothing but rejection kept him awake at night. The constant thought of failure hung over his head whenever he could sleep. What control he had in his life was slipping, right through his fingers as his carefully planned steps fell apart as he couldn’t even get past the first hurdle of being hired..

It was in the throes of a particularly trying series of interviews that he chanced upon you, this wild child who snatched what control he had of his life right from his hands. Stress filled and ready to drink the day of disappointment away, he almost knocked you down as you miscounted her steps at 3:46 AM.

Your wide, doll-like eyes were the first thing he noticed after the initial flurry of chaos. Their very color would be ingrained in his mind like the stain of violin lacquer. In the poor lighting, they maintained a hue darker than burnt umber; and they had the same gloss from a dusty, antique violin, warm and filled with the scent of cinnamon. He remembered vividly, the second you looked up and shared your first words to him. The sound of your voice was the sweet dripping poison of sun soaked foxglove tinctures in the evening. You spoke just loud enough to be heard above the hum of poorly wired fluorescent lighting. Considering how late it was, he was surprised to even see anyone else awake at that god forsaken hour.

"Friend or foe?"

You quirked an eyebrow in curiosity while you waited for his reply. Your inquiry came laced with distrust and a sense of unwavering sarcasm that he couldn't quite place his finger on. In his desperation though, he clung onto your cryptic words, dragging himself back from his daydreams into the reality that you warped. You, of all people, appeared before him when he needed company and reassurance the most. Though you made no sense, he knew, it was fate that drew the two of you together. As if you knew of his own loneliness and his frustration, you saved him from the brink of insanity with your questioning nature. He swore it was almost as if you had waited for him to come home.

"Friend," he said, after the distant hum and click of the flickering lighting became too loud to bare.

"Well then, friend," you assessed him quietly, tilting your head and noticing his striking features that stood out, even in the poor light. "What's got you worried so much that you look like death at four in the morning?"

He questioned the sincerity of your words, wondering if you really worried for his appearance and well being. With the late hour and how delirious he was from being rejected over and over again that day, nothing quite made sense anymore; and he pushed his suspicions to the side. He chose to change the subject to get a clean break away from the awkward introduction you had shared with him.

"I was just coming home. I'm in Apartment E if that means anything to you."

"Oh, well. Then we're neighbors." Your reply sounded strangely chipper and energetic for how tired he felt.

"You're up pretty late yourself... Neighbor..." It was his turn to raise an eyebrow and wait for a reply. You didn't seem like you had just come from or had gone anywhere. You simply existed at the right moment, to meet him under flickering fluorescent lighting.

"I just moved here about two weeks ago," you explained with the same bright tone and a grin on your face, not quite caring if your explanation made sense to him or not. Your toes incessantly poked at the railing in a rhythm that matched the shifting patterns in the light. "Nice to meet you though. I'm not a doctor, but I suggest you get some sleep. You look like death. See you around, stranger neighbor!"

Without much more than a click of your heels and a hum of some obscure tune, you were gone along with the sudden gust of wind from you slamming the door to your apartment. Stunned, Ignis stood there, trying to grasp what had just happened. He swore he could still see the outline of your body from the last time he blinked. You had to still be there. You had appeared to him in his need once, surely you would appear again if he willed it to be.

_What an odd girl..._

_~~_

Odd. Strange. Quirky. All these words described you, but none of them could quite capture you. "Wild" was the only other word that could come near enough to encapsulate your lifestyle and what you became to him. What _was_ strange was how a simple conversation that lasted no more than a minute and a half with you could mean absolutely everything and nothing at all to Ignis. He couldn't stop thinking about it. The words "friend or foe" echoed in his head as his days passed, and the interviews he went through dragged on.

Usually, he spent twenty hours and twenty-seven minutes away from home. During that time, it took only ninety-seven seconds to get from the entrance of the complex to his floor. In those passing moments, he saw you twice a day and eye contact with you lasted two seconds at the most, followed by a courteous nod or wave. It was routine and formal after the day he had his conversation with you that fateful night, yet the irregular counting of your steps and your fingertips against dusty stucco walls reverberated in his head and reminded him of how truly odd and what a wild child you truly were.

He sipped at your presence in the smallest amounts, acclimating himself to your mannerisms and your routine. Doing anymore than this bare minimum would drive him insane with the need to know more about you. Even though you crossed paths on a daily basis, leaving and coming back on very similar schedules, you hadn't spoken to one another after the first time. These brief passings came and went precisely at 7:14 am and 3:41 am without a word. From this routine, Ignis could feel the tips of his fingers tingle; and once again, control was back in his life.

Separate worlds. He reminded himself of this every time your eyes would so much as flicker upwards for an instance when you passed. He had no right to be anymore than an acquaintance in your life, nor did he deserve to be anything more. As enigmatic as you were, he could not let you steal his dreams. Above all, he had his goals to accomplish; and you could not stand in his way. To him, you served as a daily reminder of the distractions and temptations in the world, what must be avoided prior to obtaining his ambitions.

In reality though, each reason he didn't speak to you could be seen as an excuse. Truthfully, everything he did was an excuse to exclude himself from your life. You were a miasma of charisma he found difficult to overcome. As much of a composed gentleman as he thought himself to be, he couldn't find himself acting suave, or even normally, around you to even start up basic conversation.

Though his interactions with you were brief, he couldn't help but be infatuated with your routine outside a curt nod and a courteous wave you often gave him. He saw you nightly, when you would perch your elbows on the railing outside your apartment to look out into the city while taking a smoke or two. Always, it looked as if you were about to say something to him; however, there was that inkling of tar black fear in him that burned at his lungs which caused him to make haste to his own apartment. Sneering at him, that voice always told him that the moment he tried to talk to you like last time, you'd turn heel and walk right away again. Every time, that voice reminded him of how separated your worlds were; and it kept him from accepting the temptation of hearing what you had to say.

Ignis avoided you with every ounce of his being as much as his skin itched to know more about who you were and what you did for a living. He gnawed on his curiosity to sleep while he wondered how it was that you had such a similar schedule to his and what was it that kept you up so late at night. Every time he saw you leaning against that railing, it was as if you inhaled cleansing toxins from the cigarette between your fingers and then simply exhaled all the stress from your life in a single, long, bitter, smoke filled breath.

At first, he had found your habit obnoxious and lewd. As someone who had grown up filled with notions such as purity, discipline and perfection, such destructive habits were ingrained as taboo very early in his mind. It took him too long to notice how comforting the smell became to him as the days continued to pass through one at a time. He hadn't realized how much time had passed for the smoke and stress that you breathed out to become embedded in his own lungs and take root there like the cancer that you inhaled willingly. Somehow, your bad habit became a familiar, almost comforting smell that he came to associate with coming home after a long day. Watching this regular routine twenty-three times only made him wish he could do the same thing as you to alleviate some of the tension from interview failure after interview failure.

It was as if you knew precisely the moment he came home every night. Without fail, just as Apartment E came into his view, you'd open your door and saunter out wearing nothing but grey plaid pajama pants and a bra as if there was nothing wrong with your indecency. From thirty paces away, he unwillingly watched you casually fish around your pocket to find your lighter for the cigarette that was already dangling from your lips. Ten steps away and he saw in vivid detail how your face would glow for a few scant seconds before you took the first of seven, long drawling breaths from that glowing stick of disease.

~~

It took a total of thirty seven steps to make it from the top of the stairs to his door. He made it a point to never watch you more than the time it took for him to get to the sanctuary of his apartment. Any longer and he would have been drawn into your tilted, smoke filled insomniac world where you spoke to stars and painted landscapes along the constellations with your plague filled breaths of smoke.

At last, the routine broke. One night, as the festering weight of your short interactions with him grew too heavy, you took it upon yourself to converse with him in an attempt to make him feel less uncomfortable around you.

"How's your day been, rock star? You look like death."

"I... was born like this."

Lame. How lame could he sound at critical time like this. How stupid he must think you were to believe he could have come from his own loving mother's womb looking as the reaper himself. He could have wished for Charon to row him down the river Styx at that moment. Any dreams of becoming a successful person were instantly dashed as his embarrassment was enough for him to wish he was dead.

And then, you laughed.

As if the poison of your silken voice wasn't enough. You laughed and he became further infected and infatuated with the idea of you. He drank in the sound deeply, bottling it in his mind and tucking it in the furthest recesses of his memory for when he needed to think of how you somehow crawled under his skin and stayed there, festering, forming into the beautiful, wild child that he didn't have the courage to talk to.

"Born, that way? Come now, you're much too handsome to say something like that," you teased, turning around to rest your back against the railing and looking him up and down before taking another long draw of your cigarette. "I'd say, you just need to loosen up a little and get some more sleep." You waved your lit cigarette around and Ignis caught a whiff of that comforting scent mixed with the cloyingly sweet smell of your perfume. That night, you smelled of moonflowers and plague to him as he mustered up the courage to continue listening to your dulcet voice. "You're probably the kind of guy who's too hard on himself in an attempt to be perfect."

"Well, if I'm not hard on myself, then who would be?" Ignis countered, leaning against the wall. To think that his first full conversation with you would leave him on the defense while you read him thoroughly like a book made him uncomfortable, to say the least. The way your eyes glimmered from the flickering fluorescent lighting above only added to the unsettling feeling that he had in his gut as a hoard of monarch butterflies battered at his stomach in anxiety. He willed his body to stay calm, to stay in the control he had worked so hard to wrestle back from you.

However, when you laughed again, that feeling of anxiety and his need for control dissipated. Then, once again, he was entranced by the wild nature of your beauty; and he realized the instant you flicked away the ash at the end of your cigarette, that he needed you more than you would ever need nicotine running through your veins.

"The world is hard enough on all of us. Relax. You'll do just fine," you reassured him. "Get some sleep, rock star. You'll need it for tomorrow."

"Ignis," he corrected quickly. "My name is Ignis."

He wished the world would stop when you laughed. He swore the sound itself was enough to send his heart into palpitations when it happened.

"Ignis. It's a good name. Strong name," you commented.

When you repeated his name, he felt the butterflies in his stomach spread to his chest, thumping at his heart, blurring the edges of his vision and making his hearing ring. How beautiful it sounded when it came from your smoke kissed lips. How he wished he could have encapsulated that breath of yours to take with him to sleep that night.

Ignis watched as you took the last long drawl of your smoke; and for the first time in his life, he wondered what it would feel like to be the drug that you were addicted to. As you pronounced the last syllable of his name, his ambitions no longer laid in his need for glory. No, it became the unwavering need to become the very nicotine that caused you to take a smoke break from sleep at three in the morning.

"Yeah, it is," he concurred, his nod so small, you almost mistook it as that dreadful lamp flickering again.

“Go to bed. It’s late.”

With the tone you used and the way your voice reminded him of the death that he looked like, the conversation ran dry; and there was nothing left for him to do but to obey your words.

~~

Daylight came as it always has; however, after that night, it began an endless cycle of being reborn again and again to the sound of your voice repeating his name in his head. You greeted him regularly. Only a few words at a time were ever exchanged. The idle chatter never lasted more than a minute at the most. However, every word you gifted him dug into his heart, making it beat louder and louder in his ears until it filled his whole being and consumed him.

He learned a great deal of things about you and your life, or at least he created a vision of you from what little information you gave him. From your posture and your late hours, he fabricated your profession as a food critic. Just by the way you spoke to him, he imagined you to be from somewhere south, where the sun kissed your skin often and your days were filled with rural sunsets. Ignis turned you into the image of a woman seeking and writing about culture, unable to sleep at night due to the sounds of urban life, yearning for the free plains of childhood. Your insomnia, your drugs, you never told a single thing about yourself, other than a brief mention of your name once upon a time. But he knew all about you, just by watching you and listening for the stories in between your words..

Though the small talks you had with Ignis were just tiny glimpses into your life, he had already woven an intricate story about you from the little exchanges you had with him. You lived like the smoke you breathed out, forever free to do as you wished and to disperse at the slightest gust of wind. He envied it; and every time, you mentioned how you didn’t care, how nothing mattered and how you were taking your life one day at a time. His extensive plans of becoming a famed and beloved chef unraveled at your easy words. Ignis felt the passion he had for food become nothing more than an afterthought to what you offered in his construct of _you_.

The words you gave him crept under his skin, crawling and living there. It made him itch for you. Only you. No one else but you. Your carefree gestures snapped whatever chains of control he had over his own fate.

“Is it worth it? The stress and the lack of sleep?” you asked him one night when you had decided to extend the conversation and smoke a second cigarette.

“If I don’t have this dream, then what do I have left?” Ignis countered, leaning against the railing with you and pointedly looking at the faded stars against the light pollution of the city. “I left everything I had to have this dream. It’s my life.”

You couldn’t help but laugh. Smoke billowed forth from your nose and mouth as you jeered at his aspirations. “Being obsessed isn’t good for you, you know,” you warned, flicking the half finished cigarette off the railing and watching it fall to the ground below. “I suggest finding a hobby,” you said, before turning and retreating to your apartment.

Ignis waited until he heard the tell tale sound of your door slamming shut before carefully making his way down the stairs to search for that smoldering butt made of cancer that laid on the sidewalk. The embers still glowed dimly when he picked up the discarded cigarette. Taking a deep breath, he drank in the scent of disease and filled his lungs with the idea that maybe, if he followed in your footsteps, perhaps he would find the break he needed for his career and his reality.

The acrid taste of tobacco and fire filled his lungs, his veins, his brain with your voice, your taste, your scent and your wild nature. Ignis felt as if he truly understood you in that moment as he sucked life into the dying embers of a discarded cigarette in the middle of the night when his life spiraled completely out of control. No longer did he dream of creating art on the plate. He only knew of the ideas you imbedded into his thoughts with your tempting words filled with a world made of partially fulfilled promises of freedom.

~~

From the moment Ignis accepted the bitter reality of where his consistently failed interviews were leading him, his pride burned along with the few remnants of his dreams. Somehow, through the short time he knew you, you had become his dream. His wishes warped and shaped themselves, holding you, just as your scant shorts and bra did when you went outside in the dead of the night to greet him. Ever since he had a taste of your lips from the lingering smoke of your discarded cigarette, he was drunk off the need to know more.

The obsession began when he noticed the way your skin danced in the flickering light of the hallway. The tell tale flicker of your lighter flame trembling in your cupped hand as you lit your first smoke of the night became a beacon of what was normal to him. Anywhere outside that short hallway he shared with you was a wild, tumultuous reality that he fought daily. He became addicted to the safety that was your short talks, your laugh, your scent mingling with the smoke of your cigarettes. Ignis wanted more, as failure after failure ripped at his fragile dreams, he clung to the one thing that was secure and true.

_You._

The you he had invented was perfect. His love and adoration of the idea of you became the greed and ambition that once welled from his chest when he aspired to become famous. Somewhere, between the nineteenth time you greeted him and the twelfth time he wanted to take the burning cigarette from your fingers to drink in the drug you loved so much, he fell in love with you.

Your voice followed him, crept along the ground with his footsteps, wandered with him as he aimlessly answered questions to interviews he had held hundreds and hundreds of times at this point. Your laughter became mixed with the wailing winds of summer thunderstorms and kept him awake during the nights when foul weather didn’t allow him the privilege of seeing you. Those nights, he restlessly pressed himself up against the wall, listening to you hum incoherent tunes he was vaguely familiar with, and he dreamed of a time when you would see him as he saw _you._

He wanted you. How sorely he wanted _you_. The desire echoed in his head daily. The idea of having you squirming and quivering under him, screaming for him as his fingers brushed your heated skin kept him alive. He cherished the thought of you crying in need as he traced and touched every curve and crevice of your body. You, who had no shame had already shown him everything he needed to see. Nothing was left to the imagination when it came to you. _You_ were a reality, but his dream of _you_ would never become into being.

 _You_ were too good for the likes of him.

He was someone who had no control over his life. You were a wild child not meant to be tamed, and he would have to be content with desiring you from afar. He had no right to be in your presence; he was unworthy of your attention and he should be grateful that you offered as much as you did to him. Sick of his life, and nursing the festering feelings he had of you, Ignis lied to himself, thinking that all he needed was the short talks you shared with him. He kept telling himself that the hunger he had for you would only make you impure, tainted with his greed. And thus, he left the burning desire of possessing you to the side. What longing he had for you would be kept as an echo in the back of his mind as he preserved _you._

_After all, that's what love is, right?_

So, Ignis waited, watching you, keeping you close, subtly sipping at the toxic drug of your attention to him. His talks with you became longer as he became more infatuated with fabricating more about _you_. Some nights, he would spend hours talking to you.. Most of the time, you rambled about something he wouldn't remember the next day. Instead, he was more focused on the way your lips moved, the way they shaped your stories and the lilting cadence you used whenever you were excited. He memorized the way your fingers would flick at the ashes on your cigarette when you had to pause and laugh at some silly anecdote of your story.

He forced out his own chuckle, laughing at himself and how in love he was with the way your eyes glittered when you talked about some childhood dream. As your conversations became longer, his love for you grew deeper and deeper the more he delved into your life, the more he discovered about you, the more his need for you rotted in the back of his mind until it broke the night you spoke to someone not him.

~~

Even the screaming of the summer cicadas couldn't keep your laughter down when Ignis reached the top of the stairs. His heart fluttered when he saw your hands on another man's shoulder, your head buried against the crook of his neck and his arms around your waist. Four steps down the hallway and he felt his heart constrict when you kissed at the stranger's skin just as he imagined you would when he dreamed of you sharing your bed with him. Out in public, you giggled and proclaimed your love for this stranger. Your hands played in his hair as he whispered into your ear.

Blushing at this man's words, Ignis watched as your laugh was given to someone else and you dragged this stranger into your abode. Three steps away from his apartment door and he heard the sound of his life ending when you called out a name that wasn't his in a heady moan.

That night, he swallowed his pride in dirtied waves as he listened through the thin walls to hear your cries of pleasure and delight. Someone else was doing this to you, someone better was eliciting noises from you that only he was privy to. Whoever this stranger was, tore down the pedestal he had placed you on. Whoever you had brought home with you had sullied you and infected you with betrayal. He wouldn't stand for it. _You_ belonged to him. He had created you to who you were, that beautiful, untamable wild child. _You_ were his. _You were pure. You._

_You were perfect._

_Were._

The next day, the stranger was gone and you were once again alone. Turning to him, you greeted him and you called him by his name. Waving, with a lit cigarette in your hand, you asked him how his day went. And he had the courage to sound nonchalant for once.

"It was fine. How about you?"

Leaning against the railing in his rightful place, he felt it. There it was, that feeling again. The one where his heart fluttered whenever he turned to see you. However, this time, that flutter felt charred at the edges, dripping with the tar that settled at the bottom of your lungs. The way he felt his chest constrict when he saw the way your eyes crinkle and the way the whole world lit up when you laughed had changed, warped and reconstructed itself to something perverted. There it was again, that burning desire and disgust he had with everything around him when he realized that he wasn't the object of your affections. That moment, he realized how deeply rooted your effect on him was and there was nothing left but to love you more than anyone else ever could.

No one but him knew _you_. No one but he could understand what you needed, what freedom you craved. _You_ sought the freedom of the hills, yet you were confined to claw at the urban walls and breath your wishes out into the night sky. _You_ , the one he built in his mind had been perfected through months of listening to your stories. He knew _your_ wants, he understood _your_ truest and deepest needs . He could offer that freedom _you_ yearned for. No one else could touch you and love you the way he knew he could.

 _You_ belonged to him.

_You're mine. You'll always be mine. Don't you understand that?_

He wouldn't let this happen again. No. He couldn't have anyone else touch you like the way he could.

~~

Your wrist was surprisingly frail when he crushed it under his grip, dragging you into his apartment, slamming the door hard enough to feel the floor shake and the scant decorations on the shelves rattle. Your ribs bruised easily when he bent you over and crushed his knee into your side to keep you from breathing too deeply. He was surprised at how soft your hair felt against his fingers when he pulled you towards the kitchen and reached for the one thing that could carve his affection and brand you with his love.

"I got this as a gift from my parents when I first moved into the city. They told me that I could become loved with knives like these. I’d like to think that they were right..." he calmly explained, tilting it and admiring how the blade reflected the eerie green sheen of fluorescent lighting. He ignored the way you tugged at his sleeve with your hand and focused instead on the bruises forming on your skin from where he had grabbed at you. "Ah... It seems that I had been too rough with you. My apologies... allow me to make it better," he cooed.

His teeth against your flesh burned as he bit at the bruises and pulled away to watch blood ooze from your new wounds. Struggle as you might, his grip in your hair kept you from leaving him. Convulsing and crying, you begged him to let you go. The way your tears shimmered in the light sent a shiver down Ignis' spine. "Ah... I cannot let you go." His words almost sounded like an apology when the backside of the knife caressed your cheek. You stilled your sobs as best as you could, terrified of what else might come. "You see, my dearest.... I love you, and I cannot let anyone else have you," he purred.

The next time you felt the chilly metal of his knife touch you, it was the sharp tip of cold steel which drew blazing trails of devotion all across your shoulders and chest. When your scream filled the room the moment his blade sank past your skin, he felt most alive and in love with you. Your attention, your life, everything about you was focused on him and no one else. The adoration he felt for you was absolutely maddening and as bright as the blood that dripped freely from the veins he severed. As your screaming died down to a gurgle when blood pooled around your body, his love for you burst at the seams and painted the walls in brilliant red blossoms which matched the lifeblood that beat through his body.

For _you_.

Only for you did he have to do this.

As knife entered your flesh over, and over again, your body dismembered and eyes glazed over from pain and blood loss, the last thing you saw was the gleeful smile on Ignis' face as he cradled your face and whispered over and over "I love you. I'm the only one who could love you like this. I love you the most. I love you. I love you so much. Don't you understand? This is love. I love you..."

And as your world warped and spun around the destructive whirlpool of his obsession for you, you felt love in the strangest, most violent way. While Ignis painted blossoms of blood across the walls of his apartment and indulged in his desires, realizing that he had finally tamed the wild child.

_I love you._

-Fin-  


**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry


End file.
